BUSINESS STRATEGY
PERFORMANCE
BALANCING DATA AND GUT INSTINCTS IN DECISIONMAKING When it comes to making decisions on a new hire, many experts will say that gut instinct should be left out of recruitment. But Christine Khor explains that balancing that innate instinct with cold, hard facts has many benefits
GUT INSTINCT or intuition is thought
The role of the gut
of as dangerous ground as it can, and often has, led to a discriminatory selection process. Using intuition by itself may lead to situations where we only hire people who we know or like, people who we don’t feel threatened by, that remind us of ourselves, that are exactly the same as the other people in our team, etc. In other words, your gut instinct, if not combined with more scientific data, is likely to result in hiring the person you can see yourself having a drink with or inviting to a barbeque – not necessarily the person who is the best for the job. Though you should be wary, it is important to note that the role of gut instinct and intuition should not be completely ignored. Instinct plays a vital role in how we make decisions and prevents us from falling into the dangerous territory of groupthink and over-analysis.
Instinct is a biological function that helps us to determine danger. It is a natural subconscious response. Think of a time when you’ve met someone you just didn’t feel comfortable around and then you later found out that person had a shady past. Your intuition was confirmed by evidence. Think of a time when you felt a little off in someone’s house, only to find out later that your host had only just had a heated argument with their partner before you arrived. This is your brain taking the temperature of a room, feeling the underlying tension and responding to it by eliciting your fight or flight instinct. When it comes to business decisions, it is usually our expertise, experience and knowledge that allow us to read a situation and respond to it instinctually. So, why are we ignoring our instincts in business today?
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Analysis paralysis When it comes to business decisions, the fear of failure mindset has permeated organisations at all levels and in all industries as a not-sosurprising side effect of having gone through a global financial crisis. It makes sense that after a period of economic instability, businesses will be cautious in their strategy and business leaders will be apprehensive when making decisions. However, we all know that this kind of fear-based thinking is the major obstacle to innovation and can have a major impact on the hiring decisions of a business. Because of this fear, businesses are relying heavily on groupthink and committees. Management will call meetings, send group emails, request more research and stall for more time, rather than taking the perceived risk of making a decision. Many executives don’t want to be the one to make the final call in case things go pear-shaped. We like to call this analysis paralysis and it has become rampant in the recruitment industry. Increasingly, recruitment within businesses is being stalled by elongated processes that include numerous rounds of interviews, background checks, psychometric assess-